Utility Control Point (UCP) is one of the new management features in SQL Server 2008 R2. UCP enables you to manage and monitor multiple instances of SQL Server. Data collected by UCP managed instances of SQL Server are stored in the Utility Management Data Warehouse (UMDW) database called sysutility_mdw.

To generate data for UMDW, it is essential to create a UCP on an instance of SQL Server. In this recipe, we will use the SSMS to create the Utility Management Data Warehouse (UMDW). The steps are wizard-driven to specify a SQL instance where the UCP is created and enable the utility collection set to periodically collect and store in UMDW.